i? THE.' :: ... = I II \\" . II ... II " . % - __ ED' :: It.:: rm . <,\\\\\ "'", 0 0 ..-. . . '" o . ., ,,- THE. TALK OF TH TOWN Notes and Comment T HE change-of-season editor of Time sat down the other day, closed his eyes, opened them again, and wrote his mood piece on the coming of autumn to the U. S. The pIece was headed "Stain in the Air." "Autumn," said T'lme, "came to the U. S. last week with a SOUSE of wet snow on Denver, a spatter of cold rain on South Dakota's Black Hills, a chill wind in Chicago that moved on to New )7ork. . . . It was a time of transition and suspension. Along New England's shores, the squeak of a fisherman's oars against thole pins sounded lonely and clear in the fog of earl) morning.... On the Pacific Coast, nights had turned cold. . . . In Texas river bottoms the sweet gum trees were tinged with yellow." Then fol- lowed a quick estimate of UStemper at apple fall, ending, "In the uneasy air of 1951's áutumn, a sense of wrong stained the air like smog" ,-. This pîece, ranging ,-. so widely and concluding so sadly, depressed us, and we felt wave after wave of \\T rongsense lapping at our shingle. But right in the middle of feeling so bad we realized that, by a lucky chance, we were in an excellent position to check one of T'lme's items-the one about the squeak of a fisherman's oars against thole pins along New England's shores. We just happened to be on aNew England shore; furthermore, the hour was early and the morning was foggy. Cocking our ears, we soon picked up the sounds made by a departing fisherman. What Â. , """ ., . - - 111116 111 /11 I ,,' we heard, of course, was first the scrap- ing of the conventional galvanized row- lock in its galvanized '-socket, then, a few momen ts later, the crisp explosions of a six-cylinder Chevrolet conversion, whose cheerful pistons were soon deliv- ering more thrusts per minute than there are thole pins in all of Maine. The collapse of this single Timeitem when checked against the facts restored our sense of well-being, and we went in to breakfast wonderIng whether those Texas sweet-gum trees were tinged with yellow or with robin's-egg blue. N ew Pro gram R ADIO station WNEW has launched what it calls a discless disc-jockey show, involving the services of a discless disc jockey, and the publicity department urged us to drop over to the studIo, learn about it, and meet Wally Cox, the young stage and night-club come- dian, who supervises it and is, in fact, the discless disc jockey. When we ar- rived on the llI.:)toric scene, WNE\V's publicity chief, Bud Brandt, greeted us and introduced us to Bill Kaland, the continuity man for the show, and to Cox, a harmless-looking fellow wear- ing horn-rimmed glasses. Cox had been operatIng a contraption Mr. Brandt told us was a combination cake plate and mu- sic box; an appropriate cake reposes on the plate while the inner mechanism plays "Happy Birthday to You" or the wedding march from "Lohengrin," de- pending on the occasion. "It is my understanding," said Mr. Cox in a pro- fessIonally precise voice, "that a cake plate that plays a wedding march should, in all propriety, hold a wedding cake." Mr. Brandt shared an appreciative smile with us and remarked in a whisper that Cox's humor is that of understate- ment, or meiosis, and of the non sequitur, and then ad vised us that Cox, in addition to being a naturally extempo- raneous humorist, is a self-taught pIa) er of the ukulele, the recorder, the har- monica, and several other instruments, including two nameless, flutelike one from China; that he hailed orIgInally from Michigan; that he attended C.C.N.Y. and N.Y.U.; and that he can whistle "Happy Birthday to You" back- ward. Upon a request from Mr. Brandt, Mr. Cox cleared his throat and did so. This took place in a room crowded with assorted music-producing devices, - /w I ßI . . "",, : L .41. I : I'. 1 :i 1 J ' , - !!!!!! ... -; (( among them a couple of bird cages con- taining mechanical birds; a giant, ob- long music box; and an old Grapho- phone, a gramophone with a horn. Mr. Kaland pointed out that Cox, because of his knowledge of odd musical in- struments and his quick wit, is exactly the man to conduct the discless disc- jockey show. "The gimmick is," said Mr. Kaland, "it's going to be nothing but odd musical instruments." Süme of the instruments are so bulky that they can't be got to the studio and are heard by means of tape recordings. Kaland and Cox went to Freehold, ew Jersey, to make many of their recordings-to the warehouse there of Louis Kierstein, a retail butcher, who has the largest col- lectIon of unusual musical instruments in the East. "We had trouble when we recorded the violano virtuoso," Mr. Kaland told us "That's a player piano with a violin attached The violin strings are fingered by mechanical fingers and bowed by a mechanIcal bow. When we began to record, it fouled up the Freehold electric system and people got nothing on their TV sets but herring- hones. Mr. Kierstein told us that if we ever wanted to monkey with the violano virtuoso again, we'd have to do it on a S d ." un ay mornIng. Mr. Cox asked Mr. Kaland if any- one had been able to locate a nef "A what?" asked Mr. Kaland, caught un- prepared. Mr. Cox explained that a nef is a table utensil on wheels, modelled after a medieval sailing vessel, which ,-. whistles as it transports a bottle of winG from one section of the table to an-